Open road tolling and mobile phones to pay tolls in S Korea

South Korea's extensive tollroad system has been slow to adopt the most advanced toll collection systems but they are now catching up, and doing a couple of things very differently. Efkon, the big international toll systems company headquartered in Graz Austria along with a Korean partner has just landed a contract to do 550 free flow or open road toll lanes in South Korea - about as big as Florida's total electronic toll system.

(550 ORT lanes in Korea sound about comparable in size to the largest in North America on 407ETR in Toronto and about five times the size of the largest single US installation at the Illinois Tollway.)

And the Koreans will be using active infra-red (IR) transponders rather than the almost standard radio frequency variety.

Malaysian tollroads (about 1,700km) are so far the largest deployers of IR transponders. Some 600k IR transponders are in use in 200 lanes of 19 toll concession companies operating tollroads in that country - also Efkon's. They started to be used in 1997 and have since  replaced a variety of RF transponders from Kapsch, Q-Free and Mitsubishi.

IR tags are also in use on the Westerschelde toll tunnel in Holland.

South Korea's tollroads, dominated by the state owned Korea Expressway Corporation have taken the plunge to open road tolling (ORT) bypassing largescale single lane retrofit into old toll plazas. Under the brandname Hi-pass Korean tollroads have deployed RF transponders and self-swipe magstripe cards, as in France. More recently they have supplied Hi-pass Plus a proximity card that gets waved close by a reader holding the card out the car window.

Korean tollroads make little use of accounts, relying instead on stored value or bank cards. As in Japan and Singapore transponders in Korea have a slot for a stored value or credit/debit card. The toll transaction is a funds transfer, obviating the need to establish and manage accounts.

Mobile phones to pay tolls

Another innovation deployed recently in Korea is the use of mobile or cellular telephones to pay tolls. The third telephone company of Korea, LG Telecom, is offering a service brandnamed PassON which allows any Bluetooth equipped mobile phone to do a funds transfer toll payment at up to full highway speed between a proximity card and the toller's system. The mobile phone in effect takes the place of a slot-transponder.

The pure novelty of LG Telecom's PassON offering has generated huge publicity internationally. It does provide another option for toll payment for occasional users, but it seems to us rather clunky compared to a transponder.

Look at the woman in the picture juggling multiple devices! She won't be smiling like that once she gets on the road and has to drive as well as juggle devices.

But trust LG. (BIAS DECLARED: We'll forever loathe that company for the shoddy LG cell phone we got via Verizon.) As a way of paying tolls it looks to us like one great heap of problems.

In any case it is of far smaller significance than the 550 open road toll lanes.

In Turkey text messaging is being used to pay tolls.

Efkon RF transponder order

Efkon also won a large order recently for 5.8GHz CEN-278 standard RF transponders for the major Austrian toll operator Asfinag. Efkon beat out Kapsch, Autostrade and Q-Free for the latest batch of GO Boxes - 500k - as the transponders are branded in Austria.

Bidders had to satisfy Asfinag that their version of CEN-278 would work with other CEN-278 transponders. Shoddy standard writing in Europe led to a "standard" which for ten years has been differently interpreted by different suppliers, and difficulties in getting interoperability - defeating the point of writing a standard. Those problems are now pretty much overcome, but Europe's largest electronic toll country, Italy, still has its own system.

IR systems never adopted in North America

IR transponders have been offered to North American tollers for nearly two decades but never accepted. Efkon and other proponents of IR furiously deny it, but US engineers say they don't work well in dusty, snow or heavy rain conditions. IR is somewhat cheaper and avoids some of RF's multipath problems - a kind of bounce caused by the radio signal hitting large metallic bodies. Critics of IR respond that it has its own special problems in dealing with certain types of sun conditions.

IR proponents claim greater accuracy and less demanding tuning of reader power levels and read cones.

TOLLROADSnews 2007-09-09